Thursday, December 12, 2013

The archive has an excellent and comprehensive approach to preserving the UK government's Web presence:

It uses a crawler to trawl the UK government’s web estate, aiming to
hit sites every six months. With the government looking to shutter many
obscure or unloved sites, the pressure is on. The web archive currently
stands at around 80TB, with the crawler pulling in 1.6TB a month. At
time of writing, there are 3 billion urls in the archive, with 1 billion
captured last year alone.But does anyone really care? Seems like
they do. Espley said the archive gets around 15 to 20 million page
views a month. This often maps to current events - the assumption being
that visitors are often cross checking current government
positions/statements against previous positions.

One must hope that the cross-checking doesn't turn up anything embarrassing enough to imperil the Archive's budget ...

Friday, December 6, 2013

One of the reasons for the slowing of Kryder's Law has been that the investment needed to get successive generations of disk technology into the market has been increasing. Assuming per-drive costs and volumes are approximately stable, this means that a technology generation has to stay in the market longer to recoup its development costs. Thus, even if the proportional density increase in each generation is the same, because the generations are spaced further apart, the result is a slower Kryder's Law.

Henry Samueli, CTO of Broadcom, makes the same point about Moore's Law. As the feature size of successive chip generations decreases, the cost of the manufacturing technology increases. And the techniques needed, such as FinFET and other 3D technologies, also slow down and increase the cost of using the manufacturing technology:

Process nodes themselves still have room to advance, but they may
also be headed for a wall in about 15 years, Samueli said. After another
three generations or so, chips will probably reach 5nm, and at that
point there will be only 10 atoms from the beginning to the end of each
transistor gate, he said. Beyond that, further advances may be
impossible.
"You can't build a transistor with one atom," Samueli said. There's
no obvious path forward at that point, either. "As of yet, we have not
seen a viable replacement for the CMOS transistor as we've known it for
the last 50 years."
... the ongoing bargain of getting more for less eventually will end,
Samueli said. "We've been spoiled by these devices getting cheaper and
cheaper and cheaper in every generation. We're just going to have to
live with prices leveling off," he said.